by sean@higheredcareercoach.com | Nov 29, 2010 | Career Skills, Coaching, Job Search, Student Affairs, The Placement Experience
I am glad to be presenting on Monday at 1 pm CST/2 pm EST at the BreakDrink free fall conference. The topic will be “Mastering the Job Interview,” and it’s about getting in the right mindset to prepare for your job interview. An extended version of this presentation (and others like it) will be part of the Placement Partner hybrid coaching program that I am opening up shortly and that will continue through May.
This program is a “hybrid” mini-course for higher ed job seekers. Split into 25 sections, this program begins in December and goes through May, the traditional season for academic hiring for the upcoming academic year. There are self-paced activities that you can go through on your own on a Moodle group, and a forum where you can share your questions and ideas with other higher ed job seekers. You can add on webinars, resume coaching and assistance, e-mail coaching and one-on-one coaching.
There are three levels of participation:
- Value edition-Moodle activities, plus occasional free online chats and call-in group coaching.
- Standard edition-Everything in the Value edition, plus free admission to some webinars on job search and career-planning topics. (Value edition members can pay for those webinars they would like to attend.) Plus 2 sessions of online resume coaching and assistance, and e-mail coaching. ($300 for 180 days of access)
- Personalized edition: Includes everything in the standard package, plus 6 sessions of 1-on-1 coaching between enrollment and the end of May. ($500 for 180 days of access.)
The Moodle group is shared between all levels of seekers, and the “Value Edition” is offered at the base price ($180). Users get access to the site for 180 days ($1/day).
To upgrade to the standard edition or personalized edition, participants will be given the options to add these on after registering for the Value edition. Just go to the “Overview of the Placement Partner Coaching Program” and subscribe using the PayPal buttons for the other editions. For upgrades, you have the choice to pay the entire amount, or to spread it out over 6 installments.
Tickets to the webinars will be issued as they are scheduled to participants in the Standard and Personalized editions, and members of the value edition will be offered the opportunity to purchase tickets to the webinars before sales are opened to the general public.
Please contact me at sean@higheredcareercoach.com if you have any questions.
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by sean@higheredcareercoach.com | Nov 11, 2010 | Higher Education, Podcast, Student Affairs, Who-Dos
This Friday on the Higher Ed Life and Careers Show, Life and Career Coach Sean Cook will be joined by special guest Andrew Henck who is tweeting ideas & thoughts on leadership, nonprofits, higher ed, politics, social media from a Gen Y perspective as @MillennialTweet and blogs about them on http://themillennialjourney.wordpress.com We’ll be talking about a variety of college transition issues, his blog, and the importance of the “bookends” of the college experience…transitioning to college from high school, and out to the wider world upon graduation.
I’ll also be talking a little about mind-mapping and revisiting last week’s episode with Mark Dykeman of the ThoughtWrestling blog. Earlier this week, I announced a mind-map-your-job-search contest to get your ideas on how you could use mind-mapping to plan your job search or your long-term career plan. I’ve decided to extend the contest due to low participation so far. You can sketch out your plan on a napkin and scan it in, do a Prezi, do a document, or something else. Do it your way, and send me the document or a link to wherever you have it posted on the web. I’m looking forward to seeing what ideas people have out there, and giving away a copy of Mark’s excellent e-book: Unstuck, Focused and Organized (affiliate link.)
I also plan to do a little catch up. I had chosen people to honor in September and October for my “Who-Do” awards, to recognize them for doing great things for higher ed and student affairs. But I never got around to announcing the names of the people I had selected or tell you why. So I am going to do so on the show. I am sure you are all on the edge of your seats!
Lastly, I am going to discuss a little about where the blogs and coaching programs are heading in the next few months, and how I am hoping to tweak my business model so that I can offer better content, more services, and keep costs for paid services in line with demand. I have a few ideas that I think are pretty interesting, and I’d love to get your thoughts.
Please listen in from the episode page or click on the episode badge below. You can call in to ask questions or make comments to (347) 989-0055 or via Skype click-to-talk by pressing the Blue Skype “S” logo once the show is on the air.
Listen to internet radio with Sean Cook on Blog Talk Radio
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by sean@higheredcareercoach.com | Nov 9, 2010 | Book Reviews, Career Skills, Job Search, life purpose
Last Friday, I was glad to have my friend Mark Dykeman from ThoughtWrestling.Com on my BlogTalkRadio show. We talked about how job seekers could use mind-maps to plan their job search or to come up with a strategic plan for their career.
Mark recently released an e-book called Unstuck, Focused and Organized. I bought it, and have found it is really helping me focus my thoughts on some new programs I’d like to offer, set (or revise) some of my priorities, and basically get my act together. He’s running a great promotion this week on the e-book, the e-book plus interviews with Chuck Frey, Michael Martine, Chris Brogan and Dave Navarro, and all of the above plus one hour of consulting with Mark. Follow the affiliate link above to find out more.
Mark also made a generous offer to give away a copy of his e-book to support an idea I thought would be cool. So this week I am challenging readers to create their own job search or career-planning mind-map and share it. Embed it in your blog or send me a link via e-mail to sean@higheredcareercoach.com. It can be about any part of your search and how you hope to approach it, Just start with a central idea and then explode it, deconstruct it and see where it takes you.
I did a basic mind-map on Prezi that illustrates the Life Purpose Process and its different parts, to give readers and idea of the basic parts of the coaching model I use with clients. The model was put together by Fern Gorin and taught through her Life Purpose Institute.
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by sean@higheredcareercoach.com | Nov 5, 2010 | Career Skills, Job Search, Podcast
The hardest part of doing anything is just getting started.
If you are considering a job search this year, you probably all too aware that the hardest part of doing anything is just getting started. This can be especially true for projects that involve putting yourself out there in the public sphere and being judged.
As an academic job seeker, your job search may follow the academic cycle, with a majority of positions being posted by March, followed by interview periods from April to August, and start dates in August or September. So it’s important to a avoid stumbling out of the gate.
Mark Dykeman, creator of the Unstuck, Focused and Organized System
Mark Dykeman, my guest this morning at 11:00 a.m. on the Higher Ed Career Coach Show on BlogTalkRadio, has a good method for getting your plan together: mind-mapping. Mark is the creator of the blogs Thoughtwrestling and the Broadcasting Brain. I met him through Third Tribe (affiliate link), a membership site put together by Brian Clark, Darren Rowse, Chris Brogan and Sonia Simone and dedicated to helping small business owners authentically market their products and businesses.
Mark is a well-known and well-connected social media entrepreneur, and a really nice guy. He’s known for helping people get unstuck, focused and organized, and he’s a strong proponent of the idea of mind-mapping to clear out your mental clutter, unlock your creativity, and move forward with new ideas and plans.
I recently bought his new product, Unstuck, Focused and Organized, because I’ve been looking for ways to get more organized and stay on task. I’ve been getting much busier lately, and needed some fresh perspectives on how to organize my ideas and thoughts. I liked it so much that I joined his affiliate program, and invited him to talk about how job seekers can use mind-mapping to move forward in their search.
In today’s BlogTalkRadio show, Mark and I will talk about using Mind-Mapping to et unstuck in your job search and plan your way forward. I was able to ask Mark a few initial questions ahead of time about his program and ways that job seekers could use his approach.
Unstuck, Focused and Organized: Mind-Mapping for Higher Ed Job Seekers
(Questions are in bold, Mark’s answers are inset and italicized.)
How could someone use mind-mapping to plan their career?
Mind mapping could be used in a number of different ways. For example, if there are different stages of your intended career and different milestones, you could use the mind map to examine each stage. Here’s a simple example: have major categories or branches of the mind map to correspond to different levels of corporate hierarchy:
- consultant/team member
- team leader
- manager
- director
- vice-president
You could explore each role in detail, including key education requirements, work experience, networking, mentors, and so on. This would be a useful first step in coming up with a plan. You could also do something similar with the type of companies that you would want to work at as well, focusing on both functional experience and industry segment experience.
If you were planning a job search during the next year, how could mind-mapping help you focus your efforts?
There’s several different ways that you could plan your job search. You could conduct a SWOT analysis using a separate branch for each aspect. You could use a mind map to compare your skills and experience to different types of jobs about there: the mind map could help you find key skills to emphasize in your job search as well as important gaps or shortfalls to consider.
You could also use the mind map to explore all possible ways to network and search for the job, which is much better than firing resumes into the ether and hoping for the best.
What’s the best way to start?
The best way to start mind mapping, if you’ve never done it before, is to use a pencil and a huge piece of paper. Write your central or core idea that you want to explore in the center of the paper. Then start writing down every thought or idea that you can think of around the center of the paper. When you’ve gotten everything out that you can think of, take a few minutes and look at it. Look for connections between things. See if you can group similar things together into major categories. Draw lines between things that could be connected. Doodle and draw on it, if you feel like it, in ways that would be meaningful. Look for holes – things that are missing.
The reason for using a pencil? Because you’ll probably want to redraw the mind map after this first try!
We’ll discuss the features and benefits of Mark’s UFO program and different ways to use mind-mapping to plan your job search and your career in general. He’ll also announce a special promotion he’s running next week.
Please join us at 11 a.m. today (Friday, November 5) for the podcast, and call in with your questions and comments to (347) 989-0055 or via Skype click-to-talk.
on Blog Talk Radio
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by sean@higheredcareercoach.com | Nov 2, 2010 | Coaching, Higher Education, Job Search, The Placement Experience
Have you ever had a busy time, when you knew you couldn’t afford to miss a step? You knew it was coming, and you made a plan to juggle all your responsibilities, and you were ready, in the words of Project Runway’s infamous Tim Gunn, to just “make it work.”
And then, despite all the planning, thinking things out from different angles, and even planning the contingencies, you trip over some unexpected change in terrain….
Boom. Flutter. Fall.
Flat on your face. Ouch-ey! And you wonder whether you should even bother to get up.
Fall has been kinda like that for me, and I’m finally at a point where I need to start over, focus on some core priorities, and let some other things go (or delegate them out). This week, I’m going to tell you what I’ve been doing with my time, and ask you to help me prioritize a bit by letting me know what you’d like to see.
Part 1: The Blog(s)
Readership was pretty consistent last spring during the “placement conference season” and through the summer. July was the best month for traffic, probably in part due to the “down time” many of us experience right before the August/September madness. Since August readership has been down, and I’ve been struggling to come up with fresh content, in part because I am juggling several other projects now, including a part-time gig with Wesleyan College down in Macon, GA, a hybrid coaching course for placement season, some webinars, some guest posts for other blogs and web sites, and the beginnings of some e-books and other “informational products.” I also helped plan a half-marathon.
I thought I had some good plans for this fall, and a good idea of how to execute them. But I got stuck in a few details, distracted by other projects (who knew planning a half-marathon would require so much work?) and then thrown off by a few life events (both cars robbed in my own driveway a couple of weeks back.) So my blogs are off-track, my business has taken a back-seat to a race, my office is a mess, my schedule is full, and there are days I look back over my shoulder and say “where did the day go, and what do I have to show for it?”
I’ve been teetering between the two big options lately: giving up and bucking up. When I set out to do this, I had idealistic reasons in mind, and some pie-in-the-sky ideas about how I’d turn my interests and idealism into a sustainable business and lifestyle. The reality is that I’ve been stumbling through some of it, and like anyone, I could use some feedback and direction. So I’m turning to you. I’ve decided not to quit (at least not yet).
- What do you think I should do to mold this idealistic vision of helping higher ed job seekers into a sustainable business model?
- What interests you?
- What would you be willing to pay for?
- What do you want?
- And what do you need?
Last year, I did a good job of building up some partnerships and getting guest writers. In July I had a few, and it was the best month for readership for both HigherEdLifeCoach.Com and HigherEdCareerCoach.Com. Many of my regular guest bloggers have started new jobs or had other significant changes in their lives. I’m working with a couple to find time to “get back on the horse,” but I’m also going to bring in some new contributors, so the content can be fresh, and so new voices can find a platform. As I do, I could use your input to help me prioritize any changes or updates to the blogs.
As a reader:
- Which past guest posts have you enjoyed the most?
- Which contributors?
- What topics do you want to read more about?
- And if you are a writer or a fellow coach, what would you like to contribute?
- Should we have more video and audio posts, slideshows, resource lists, tips and tricks?
- Do you like book reviews, product reviews, or “wish list” types of posts?
- How often should we have new posts? I had been shooting for 2-3 per week.
Please share some ideas that will help improve the blog, either by commenting below or by sending feedback to sean@higheredcareercoach.com.
Thanks!
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